Never Mind the Pollacks, A Rock and Roll Novel with Neal Pollack, by Neal
Pollack, Perennial, paperback, 2004.

Neal Pollack is bigger than Jesus.

Or
so he would have you believe.

In
reality — that is, in fictional reality — he is a Hunter S. Thompson-esque rock
critic who witnessed every seminal moment of rock history in the last 40 or so
years. He’s a man so connected with his subject that he doesn’t believe himself
to be covering rock and roll, he is rock and roll. He lives hard and fast and
has an addiction to cough syrup, among other drugs. But his life is a journey, a
journey in search of the purity of music. He is the very spirit of American
music.

He
is also completely full of crap.

Pollack, the honest-to-god actual Neal Pollack, is part of the McSweeny’s crowd
of smartass wordsmiths. He has a remarkable ability to mimic the fatuous vanity
of famous writers. In his The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, he
goes after the Ernest Hemingway types, the Truman Capotes, the George Plimptons.
Using their celebrity-obsessed, ego-inflating style of non-fiction writing,
Pollack inserts himself (or rather the character called Neal Pollack) into a
variety of historically significant, always exclusive events.

In
his latest book, Never Mind the Pollacks, Pollack takes on the world of rock
criticism, the most serious practitioners of which seem more interested in
recreating the rock lifestyle than in actual studies of rock. Or, when they do
approach the subject of the actual music, it’s with five-dollar works and an
academic bent, the real purpose of which is to disguise the fact that the story
was written only shortly before deadline by a drunk/high/mentally unbalanced
writer.

The book is actually “authored” in parts by a rock critic even more of a
pompous ass (though less talented) than Pollack, Paul St. Pierre. Here is a man
who knows not only all about Pollack’s life—his time with the Ramones, his
beginnings as Nobert Pollackovitz, the many Pollack stories involving vomit—but
has an equal appetite for name-dropping and navel-gazing. He follows the great
writer from his first encounter with Clambone Jefferson, the blues man who gives
Pollack “The Message” about his art, to his discovery of Kurt Cobain (Pollack
dies a mere three days before Cobain does). Ah what a magical adventure.

Actually, it’s less magical and more snarky, biting satire about what remains of
the Jann Werner-worshiping segment of the world.